Barefoot & Finding My Way

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The “C” Word

Recently, I’ve been seeing several of the writer/bloggers that I follow talking about NaNoWriMo. Plans for how to prepare for it, strategies to get focused for it. After the second or third blog that mentioned it, I decided that I needed to find out what this challenge was all about.

Apparently, November is National Novel Writing Month. Who knew?

The goal, according to the NaNoWriMo website, is to write 50,000 words before the end of the month.

No worries. Piece of cake.

Really?

When I first read about this, my mind went wild. 50,000 words!! Insane! How could that even be accomplished in one month?!

Then, being me, I had to do the math. 50,000 words translates to roughly 1,666 per day. Which is the equivalent of about three pages. Or five book pages. (Yes, I measured several of my paperbacks to figure out a standard book size and created a template with those margins on my computer. That’s not weird, is it?) So I realized that the goal was actually do-able, but it would take several hours every day to accomplish.

As much as I love writing, there are some aspects of it that don’t come easily to me. One of them is Commitment.

Which means, I need to put this ahead of everything else. For the rest of the month, this comes first. Before working out, before organizing the pile of stuff shoved into the second bedroom closet. The world won’t stop spinning if I let the other pieces of my life go for a couple of weeks and truly make writing a priority for once.

I decided to give it a shot. I even upped my Word Count goal to 2,083 to account for the fact that I found out about this a little late and didn’t actually start until 11/7. That way I should still hit the 50,000 by the end of the month. So far I’m running a little bit behind my goal, but I’ve still written over 7,000 words since Wednesday, which is actually pretty incredible for me, and I’m feeling really great about the progress I’m making in the story.